By Deep Kaushik Vakil, Sam Mellins and Meghnad Bose
New York City Mayor Eric Adams was slated to attend an event in Queens next week featuring a prominent far-right Hindu activist, according to the event’s organizers, before withdrawing yesterday, a day after New York Focus sent inquiries about his attendance.
The event, a dinner at an Indian cultural center in Fresh Meadows, Queens, will feature Indian Hindu nationalist activist Kajal Shingala, whose speeches frequently feature calls for violence against Muslims in India and boycotts of non-Hindu businesses.
“She is one of the most prolific Hindu far-right orators,” said Raqib Hameed Naik, who runs an organization tracking hate speech in India that has catalogued dozens of Shingala’s speeches. “She has been at the forefront of promoting anti-Muslim, anti-Christian hate, bigotry, and speeches that incite violence.”
A spokesperson for Adams, Zachary Nosanchuk, said that while Adams’s attendance at the event was requested by organizers, “he never planned to attend and it was never on the Mayor’s public schedule.”
Harshad Patel, president of the Gujarati Samaj of New York, which is hosting the dinner, and other event organizers told New York Focus that the mayor’s team had confirmed his attendance.
They promoted a flyer advertising his attendance at the event as the guest of honor. Shingala, who uses the name Kajal Hindusthani online, also shared the poster on her social media platforms, where she has close to a million followers across Facebook, Instagram, and X. Patel is separately organizing a fundraiser at his house for Adams’s reelection bid this evening, which the mayor is still planning to attend, Patel told New York Focus.
Adams faces an uphill battle to win reelection as an independent against state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month and would be the first Muslim mayor of New York City.
Mamdani has been the subject of a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiment online. Supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who has strong ties with Gujarati Hindus in the United States, including the Gujarati Samaj of New York — have pilloried Mamdani after he called the prime minister a “war criminal” at a mayoral forum hosted by New York Focus and Hell Gate. Mamdani, whose father is a Gujarati Muslim, spoke at the forum about Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots.
This story was originally published in nysfocus.com. Read the full story here.
